Traditional US news media outlets have all but given up on reporting, as distinct from commentating, on the presidential election. And candidates and voters alike have seemingly all but given up on the news media to hear, understand and articulate the political narrative of the moment.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ blitz of media interviews this week — kicked off with a 40-minute chat on Call Her Daddy, one of the most popular podcasts in the world (and “the most listened to podcast by women”) — may as well represent a public announcement of divorce from traditional media.
Harris followed this interview with a 60 Minutes election special on CBS, then the ABC’s women’s panel show The View, before heading back to CBS for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. And in between it all was a widely syndicated talk radio chat with Howard Stern.
“Mostly friendly,” sniffed The New York Times, which has been whining for more than six months about being knocked back by both President Joe Biden and Harris for a “real” sit-down.
It’s a redux in old media’s battle against emerging media, a reprise of August’s brouhaha when the Democratic National Convention accredited about 200 “content creators” (alongside about 1,000 more traditional journalists). The creators’ reward, wrote Taylor Lorenz, was to be “mocked and belittled” by the serious pundit class. (Lorenz, who has written widely on influencer culture, recently left the increasingly play-it-safe Washington Post to start a Substack.)
“The entitlement, the arrogance, and the gatekeeping is appalling,” she wrote. “This is the same kind of protectionist behaviour that has been happening in the media world for decades, as many invested in institutional power structures lash out amidst their dwindling influence.”
The reporting of the Washington press corps on Harris’ Call Her Daddy interview showed why the vice president is looking for media where she can directly reach the audience she wants to talk to (mainly women).
The press corps delivered exactly what we’ve come to expect from oh-so-irrelevant insider political reporting — all the politics about the politics. The New York Times, for example, led with her response to the “childless cat lady” misogyny. (“All the news that’s fit to print” the masthead has bragged since the 1800s. More like, all the reporting that’s safe enough to highlight.)
At the same time, in their coverage of Harris, these same journalists are centring Republican talking points while tip-toeing around Trump and his surrogates. “Oops. They Did it Again”, wrote The New Republic this past weekend, in response to the media’s light touch on the latest Trumpian rhetoric, which was “so insane and offensive” it just broke through the legacy media’s now endemic “sane washing”.
It’s a failure of a genre, not of journalism. The news is out there.
If you want your dose of unadulterated tripe, er, Trump, you will be following, as The New Republic reminded its readers, the multi-platform independent journalist Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice, where he documents the lowlights of every Trump appearance. Or if you want to understand the Trump criminal cases dogging the campaign (and that are consistently downplayed by traditional media), you’ll be reading alternative voices like Allison Gill in her newsletter, Breakdown.
The US legacy media has found itself jostled aside by new players and tools — particularly Substack, podcasting and YouTube. Semafor’s Max Tani reported this week that Substack has added more than 1 million paid subscribers over the past year alone.
Down the political news supply chain, the old guard has been forced to reposition itself as less (much less) a must-have source and more a predictable home of political punditry. Trouble is, the old guard’s visceral repudiation of anything smelling of activism means we have a press corps without any practical political experience who dissect politics with disdain.
It wasn’t always so. In a gentler age, enough political reporters would rotate through stints in government — like once-was Insiders host Barrie Cassidy or The Sydney Morning Herald’s Alan Ramsey — infusing in their journalism a deeper sensibility of both the value and the practice of politics as a social good.
The flea-biting punditry inevitably draws its own critics. As the old saying goes, “Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em. / And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum“.
Traditional media outlets used to employ their own little fleas, er, “media critics”. But in 2022, Margaret Sullivan left The Washington Post and Ben Smith ditched The New York Times. Here in Australia, The Australian’s media section appears Monday, but its criticism is strictly for others.
The bites are getting to old media. The NYT’s Maggie Haberman scratched back at the accusations of sane-washing on NPR’s flagship Fresh Air program last month: “I think there is an industry, bluntly … that is dedicated toward attacking the media, especially as it relates to covering Donald Trump and all coverage of Trump.”
“Industry” may be a conspiratorial overstatement. But there is a broad network of little and lesser fleas across the new platforms, critiquing away at media practice. One of the longest-lasting, Media Matters, is currently being sued by Elon Musk for its reporting on the X algorithm.
Fifty years ago, the 1972 US presidential election gave us the first big exposé — The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse — on the sausage-making that is access political journalism. Maybe this election, the same job is being done on the cheap political punditry that now puffs out America’s legacy media.
What do you make of the media’s coverage of Donald Trump, Kamala Harris and the US election? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
